Painting in the Shadow

The almost invisible images of a hitherto unknown painter called Eusebius, who worked in San Vitale Ravenna and in Vivarium, are a gallery of portraits of his famous contemporaries such as Theodoric, Vitiges, Amalasunta and a visual commentary of Justinian's tyrannical behaviour. Living between two ages, without belonging to either this solitary man, who was born an Arian but died a Catholic, at once both Goth and Roman Latin, represents the fullest embodiment of a type of cultural "hybridisation" that is well attested throughout history. Eusebius is a spiritual brother of those "hybrid" artists (Serge Gruzinski), who have left extraordinary examples of "grotesques" populated by fantastic beings - chimeras with multiple heads, sirens, monsters, living hieroglyphs of their own contradictory, exuberant, and vital identity. Having survived Cassiodorus, whose teachings he seems to have understood better than others at the time, Eusebius exerted a beneficial influence on the monks of the Vivarium, living to a ripe old age. After having embodied for so long the unbiased tolerance which motivated him in his collaborations with a very diverse range of men and which had been the core of his own life and those of his companions in Ravenna: that mixture of confidentiality, intelligence, pointed irony, fantasy, and - why not? - touch of madness which had helped him to navigate through the troubled waters of his age, always leaving at the margins the demons who haunted him.